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Notes -
Devon Eriksen expressed the problem with this in horrifying fashion a few weeks ago:
To some extent you might expect this sort of thing to be a problem that's also its own solution: if some cultures evolve poorly, well, the ones that didn't will just replace them again.
Memetic natural selection was never really a good solution. Anthropology had the "Pots, not People" movement that suggested cultural diffusion was often a peaceful spread of winning ideas rather than a violent expansion of people armed with winning ideas, but even Wiki admits that
You'd think that progressives would have fought harder against such a bleak dog-eat-dog view of the world, but maybe something about the typical "lots of ancient DNA survived in-place, but the Y chromosomes all came from the invaders" evidence resonates with their worldview in other ways.
But memetic natural selection probably isn't even a possible solution, today.
Thankfully, in the modern era wars of conquest are more frowned upon, and intellectual production and publication are far greater, and so the diffusion and uptake of ideas is the main source of cultural change ... but the trouble is that evolution just doesn't work the same way via that mechanism! Even if the only change to cultural evolution was that far more memes now spread horizontally (like genes in viruses) rather than vertically (like genes in mitochondria),
Newly screwed up mitochondrial genes can kill a person horribly (no hyperlink for this one - it was too depressing that Google searches mostly bring up children's hospital web pages), but new screwed up viral genes can kill whole swaths of a population horribly, before the virus evolves to be less virulent or the survivors evolve resistance to it. Backing out of the metaphor, I guess that's the three possible answers to my "how utterly monumental a change would it be to get from here to there?" question, isn't it? Either a bad new culture wrecks everything so badly that something else climbs out of the wreckage, or its badness is offensive enough to get outcompeted by less offensive forms of itself before it creates too much wreckage, or it's rejected by subcultures that eventually outbreed it. I'm hoping for #2 or #3, myself. #1 seems like the only hope of a major conservative cultural restoration, but the cost would be atrocious, and I'm not really conservative, and it's hard to forecast exactly what flavor of conservatism would be the one to come out on top afterward.
Hmm... my first impulse is to say that no apologies are necessary, and point out that
grepfinds a bunch of quotes from you in my personal archives that I'm happy to repay in part. That's all true, but I do notice that those quotes are from your /r/themotte days rather than from TheMotte. Probably even that's just because I read here less and archive much less than I did 3 years ago, but if you think you've been slacking off lately, don't let me discourage you from whatever self-criticism keeps you at top form! ;-)Same here, I haven't been around The Motte as much as in the old days. Reading still, usually around the monthly QC collections, but commenting less.
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That Devon Eriksen quote pretty much describes a good portion of my own worldview, and your analogy about mitochondria versus viruses sums up another chunk (indeed, it's a metaphor I use myself from time to time). And I, for one, think #1 is pretty much inevitable, with maybe the slimmest hope of #3 (though I think that to be successful, #3 can't rely on "outbreeding the enemy" alone, and will ultimately have to resort to a superior capacity for violence).
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For what it’s worth, there is good historical (and contemporary) evidence that people have always learned cultural practices from one another, instead of it being purely transmitted by conquest or force. A fairly elementary example is the extremely rapid spread of crops in the Columbian Exchange, a slightly deeper cut is Japan’s conscious and discerning importation of Western norms post-Meiji Restoration, and a perhaps controversial take is that cargo cults were (are?) an ineffective attempt to learn Western practices.
This would roughly be your “virus” case of horizontal transmission. But what I think your model misses is how and why people transmit cultural knowledge, and how the selection effects work mechanically. I believe that this is through conscious recognition of tangible outcomes that can be hypothetically correlated with the practice for positive selection, and implicit comprehension of norms on their own terms for retention of behavior. In plain language, you pick a practice up either because it’s doing something good for someone else or because it’s just the way things are done. Let’s call the first case adaptation and the second retention.
Every practice has its price. There’s a cost for following it instead of doing something else, including doing nothing at all. It also has a certain legibility to it. Using a certain spice in one’s cooking obviously and visibly changes the flavor, but increasingly complex crop rotation schemes will only show their merit on the order of years. Superior military practice can only demonstrate its worth in the event of a war. Finally, there is a magnitude to what the practice will do for you. Diminishing returns are always an issue.
So for adaptation to occur, you need the perceived advantage of a new practice, inclusive of how confident you are that the practice causes the advantage, to significantly exceed the cost of adapting the new practice.
Meanwhile, retention just works like any old social pressure. If you don’t do this, you aren’t cool. The power of retention is in proportion to the power and influence of the normative group over you.
Back to the actual meat of the subject. Right now, I would argue that the following propositions obtain:
Back to adaptation. What people these days see is not a minefield of viscerally bad outcomes with cultural guardrails, or obviously superior external groups to learn from if one is not to fall behind. Instead, they see a more-or-less flat floor of outcomes with a huge amount of outdated rules that are visibly being broken to the pleasure and advantage of the rulebreakers. Cultural norms around how to get the most visible pleasure spread like wildfire, and there are clear reasons given for why the old ways are outdated. Nothing immediately and unignorably bad happens to the people who adopt these practices, so the change keeps spreading. Debt, drugs, sexual liberation, obsessive hobbies, and so on.
Meanwhile, a massive proportion of cultural practices are exported as part of a social-political program by the cultured urban elite. These have some basis in people’s preferences, but their spread is almost totally disconnected from these preferences, and is instead based in political maneuvering within this class. It’s effectively fashionable beliefs.
And finally, and most critically, most of the bad outcomes from these practices only manifest on a multigenerational basis. The fertility crisis will only really come to a head as the older people keeping the lights on retire or lose the capacity to handle their work. A life of solitude or sexual misconduct only really comes calling when you get old with no younger family to take care of you. Unproductive behavior only starts incurring costs when it spreads so far that bare minimum upkeep becomes infeasible and the pre-existing infrastructure crumbles - like an ill-cared-for house.
So my analysis would be, at this very moment we are coming down the tail end of a very unrepresentative and culturally dysgenic era. The selective pressures were encouraging bad behavior for around sixty years, and have incurred some major costs. Some of those bills are already coming for repayment, and the younger generations are starting to flail around for superior cultural practices. Some will likely not come fully due for decades to come, and will cause their own crises. But there is some intelligence behind this, and it can be directed. People are already trying to direct it. The problem is just that the outcomes we need to see are another sixty years away. So until then, the best we can do is proceed with discernment, wisdom, and most of all, faith.
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